The Sound of Silence

I’m currently sitting in the passenger side of our family’s Jeep Grand Cherokee. The windows are slightly cracked to avoid burning precious gas with the air conditioner, and my 1 year old toddler is screaming in the back seat because we decided not to play her requested song for the 14th time.

For this month’s Creative Quest with Channel Twelve, we’re exploring the theme of sound, and I’ve decided to focus more on silence than actual sound. In this moment, silence would be the absolute best thing to be experiencing.

It’s in the silence that my brain gets a chance to meander through fields of thoughts, pick up interesting ideas, and drop some off by the wayside.

As I’ve been tuning into the silence more often, I’m realizing that it’s not as silent as I was expecting it to be. The voices in my head are actually pretty loud when I don’t have anything else distracting me from them. They really have a lot to say.

I found out the other day that not everyone has a relentless inner monologue going on and it intrigued me. This phenomenon is called aphantasia, also known as blindness of the mind’s eye. Blew my mind, honestly. Until that moment, I never imagined a world where people didn’t think in sentences or have mental conversations with themselves.

That’s a level of silence that I truly can’t fathom but I’m completely fascinated with it.

What about you? Do your thoughts have a voice or is silence your friend?

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